While she did all this, she recorded everything she saw. Like most police officers, Sandra wore eyejack lenses, the raw footage feeding into a huge database that could be merged into a single, time-tagged, three-dimensional image of the site. The detectives and bomb experts would study the data for clues as to what had happened. Was it a terrorist attack? Or just a catastrophic engineering failure? Feedback to her lenses told her which views and angles were under-represented, encouraging her to aim her vision in directions that would help fill in the holes.
The news she was getting through her phone told her the media was already pointing fingers at the Turks. With American forces in Poland and Germany blocking the Turkish advance, and the Turkish navy controlling access to the Mediterranean, this was hardly a surprise. The talking heads called it a Turkish attack on American soil, comparing it to Pearl Harbor and calling for war. The Turkish president officially denied it, and it was hard for Sandra to see what they would gain from such a move. Though she supposed terrorists operated under a different set of assumptions than most people.
She hadn’t seen her sergeant in hours, so she just wandered the site, joining gangs of workers where she saw a need. She queried the central database to see what views had not yet been covered and headed in those directions, trying to provide as much data as possible to the professionals whose job it was to make sense of it all. All around her, there was the horror of death, so much death that she could hardly take it in. She felt emotionally detached, floating in a protective bubble her mind had formed around the experience. Her awareness collapsed to simple tasks. Step over the twisted metal. Help lift the concrete slab. Check GPS and shift viewing angle to forty degrees.
Her father still didn’t return her calls.
“Hey! Officer! Could you give me a hand?”
Sandra turned to see a young man in a black Robson Forensic cap waving to her. He was struggling to haul two black hard cases on wheels over the debris-strewn ground.
“Finally,” he said. “What’s a guy got to do to get a girl to pay him some attention?”
She narrowed her eyes, not in the mood for humor. “What do you want?”
“Could you take one of these? This is really a two-person job.”
One of the cases was the size of a large suitcase; the other was big enough to hold a bass fiddle. Sandra took the smaller one. “What is all this stuff?”
“ID equipment,” the forensic tech said, puffing as he hauled on the larger case.
Sandra imagined a lab on wheels, blood testing and DNA, taking samples from the thousands of bodies and determining their identities. “You can do that in the field?”
The tech didn’t answer. They had reached a flat area with a minimum of debris. “This will do,” he said. “Open that one up, will you?”
Inside she found telescoping poles, wires, and what looked like a large security camera. “What kind of ID kit is this?” she asked.
“The best kind, I hope,” the tech said. He opened the larger case. Sandra didn’t understand at first what she was looking at. The case seemed to be stacked with dozens of small electric fans.
The tech circled around to the smaller case and pulled out lengths of pipe, assembling them with ease. In short order, he constructed a ten-foot tripod stand with the camera device on top. From the bottom of the case, he extracted a box with levers and a long antenna, like a remote control. “Stand back,” he said.
He flipped a switch, and the larger case started rumbling. It vibrated visibly, chattering against the concrete.
“What—” Sandra started to say, but she was interrupted by a sound like the buzzing of a hundred angry bees. Out of the case rose a formation of two dozen quad-rotored helicopters, each the size of a dinner plate. They dipped in unison, shearing off to the right just as a second formation rose up to take their place. Each formation was a perfect rectangle, six copters by four, flying inches apart and moving as if locked together. At a cue from the tech, they left their places and flowed into a new formation, twenty-four wide by two deep.
He pressed another button, and the quadcopters shot off toward the ruined stadium, doing twenty or thirty miles an hour, eight feet above the ground. Several people shouted or leapt away, but the copters veered effortlessly to miss all obstacles, breaking out of formation or angling their flight as necessary. Sandra looked after them in awe. In the darkness, their LED lights swirled like a swarm of fireflies. Above her head, the device that looked like a camera came alive, smoothly slewing back and forth as if aiming at each of the receding quadcopters in rapid succession.
Some of the people nearby threw dirty looks their way. A few picked themselves off the ground after diving to avoid the copter brigade.
Sandra forgot her astonishment and wondered if she’d just been tricked. She had no idea what this guy was doing, but it wasn’t forensics. Was he a reporter? Or was he a terrorist, out to destroy evidence or make a secondary attack?
She undid the snap that held her pistol in its holster. “Put the remote down,” she said.
He looked bewildered. “But—”
“Now!”
He dropped the remote and held up his hands. “You don’t understand—”
“What kind of stunt are you trying to pull? You said this was ID equipment.” She reached for her radio to call him in.
“It is!” he said. “The copters have RFID readers on board. I told you the truth.”
She paused. She would make a fool of herself if she called in a real CSI.
“Let me see your ID,” she snapped.
“Honest,” he said.
“ID.” She held out her hand.
Sheepish, he dug around in a pocket and handed up a laminated card. It was a University of Pennsylvania student ID.
“You’re a student?”
He looked offended. “I’m an engineering doctoral candidate in robotics and sensory perception.”
“Put your hands down.”
He put them down. “I’m allowed to be here.”
“What about the cap?”
He took it off and looked at the logo. “Oh,” he said. “Some of the forensic outfits hire us sometimes.”
“And who gave you permission to loose a fleet of helicopters in a crowded search and rescue scene?” she said.
“It’s a swarm, not a fleet,” he said. “Look, most of the people who died out there have cards in their wallets with RFIDs in them. Credit cards, gas cards, SEPTA cards. They work with magnetic resonance; illuminate them with a burst of radio energy, and they fire back a signal with a number on it. With the right databases, those numbers can be turned into people’s names. The quadcopters tag the number and the GPS coordinates, and boom: we have a map of the positions and IDs of every person on the site. Well, nearly. A lot of them anyway.”
Sandra was cooling down now that he seemed to be legit. She holstered her weapon. “What’s the camera for?”
“This?” he said, pointing up at the device on the tripod. “That’s the radio transmitter. I have to use a pretty narrow beam to get a strong enough return signal through the rubble. The copters can’t carry one, so I mount it here and coordinate them. Most RFID readers are two-way, but I had to split it up: the transmitter here to pulse the energy at each spot on the ground, and the copters at the right spot at just the right time to detect any returns.”
“And you had permission to do this?”
He winced. “Sort of.”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“The chief told me I could do whatever harebrained experiment I wanted as long as I got out of her way.” He gave an awkward smile. “I guess I charmed her with my rugged good looks.”